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chiseler · 4 years ago

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VISAGE... VOICE... VITAPHONE

In Dimitri Kirsanoff's Menilmontant a destitute waif, betrayed and abandoned by the man who seduced her, sits on a park bench with her newborn infant. Beside her is an old man eating a sandwich. This wordless exchange is one of the greatest moments ever committed to film. Nadia Sibirskaia’s face reveals all of life’s cruel mysteries as she gazes upon a crust of bread.

The persistence of hope is the dark angel that underlies despair, and here it taunts her mercilessly. A whole series of fluctuations of expression and movement in reaction to anguish, physical pain involving hesitation, dignity, ravenous hunger, survival, self-contempt, modesty, boundless gratitude. All articulated with absolute clarity without hitting notes (without touching the keys). Chaplin could have played either the old man on the bench (his mustache is a sensory device!) or Nadia. And it would have been masterful and deeply affecting, but Nadia went beyond virtuosity and beyond naturalism.

She made it actual. And it was more than just a face. Sunlight travels across buildings at every second of the day; and the seasons change the incidence of light, too. Nothing stands still. Even déjà vu doesn’t attempt an exact rendition with the feel of a perfect replay.

***

Another face equates with pain—though a far more luxurious and decadent kind of pain, a visage summoning leftover ancient Roman excess or Florentine backstreets, the contortions of Art Nouveau with its flowers, prismatic walls and perennial themes of ripeness/rottenness, sadomasochism. While various directors have helped mold her naturally unsettling screen presence into nightmare visions, it’s Barbara Steele's vulnerability I tend to remember.

She is open and sensitive even as she materializes in the viewer’s mind as a kabuki demon one moment and a radioactive waxwork the next, a kind of alchemical transformation, an appeal to what Keats called negative capability—one’s ability to appreciate something without wholly understanding it; in fact, one’s ability to appreciate an object for its mystery.

“When did I ever deserve this dark mirror?” Barbara Steele asks me. “Clever you – I feel you’ve just twisted and wrung out an old bible to dry that’s been left somewhere outside lost in timeless years of…” She pauses. “…of rain.”

She made her Italian screen debut as a revenant. And in so doing taught us all the eye is not a camera. It’s a projector.

Barbara Steele’s appearance in 1960’s Black Sunday is, even now, a shock of such febrile sexuality that it forces us to ask ourselves—why do we saddle her with diminishing monikers like “Scream Queen”? And, more fundamentally, why does her force of personality seem to trouble and vex every narrative she touches?

Of course, the answer is partly grounded in Steele’s unique physical equipment—and here I’ll risk repeating a clichéd word about those famous emerald eyes of hers: “Otherworldly.” As if sparked to life by silent-film magician Segundo de Chomón, the supreme master of hand-tinted illusionism. Peculiar even within the context of gothic tales on celluloid for the consumption of Mod audiences, flashing at us from well beyond their allotted time and place in history.

Barbara Steele is one of cinema’s true abominations—a light-repelling force that presents itself in an arrangement of shadows on the screen. No “luminary,”Steele is celluloid anti-matter; a slow burning black flame that devours every filament around it. Steele’s beauty is no accident of nature, even if she is, but in Black Sunday she gives a virtuoso performance by an artist in full command of her talent summoning and banishing it in equal measure in her dual role as mortal damsel in distress and undead predator released from her crypt. Filmmaking is the darkest and unholiest of arts (done right, that is), and for Mario Bava it becomes the invocation of beast and woman from the unconsecrated soil of nightmares. Steele remains the high priestess of the unlit and buried chambers of the imagination; the pure pleasure center of original sin and the murderous impulse buried just below the surface. She reminds us that existence itself is the highest form of betrayal and a continuing curse on us all.

Where Steele’s Italian films are concerned, we are watching silent movies of a sort. “The loss of voice for me has always been devastating…. It’s almost like some karmic debt…” Her sonic presence was eclipsed in a string of crudely, sadly dubbed horror vehicles, yes, including Black Sunday—no doubt aficionados of the great Mario Bava will object to my calling it a “vehicle.” But whenever Steele appears, the storyline falls away. Anachronism rules. Not to mention the director’s exquisite sets, all keyed and subordinated to his ingénue’s stark loveliness (understood in black and white, molded by Italian cameramen into disquieting and sudden plasticity). Like a hot-blooded funerary sculpture made of alabaster, raven hair piled high, Steele’s already imposing height summons schizoid power, satanic sorcery—she’s Eros and Thanatos dynamically balanced. I’ve screened the film many times; and the famous opening sequence invariably leaves my otherwise jaded film students looking traumatized. (Just as a young Martin Scorsese was shattered by it once upon a time.) Barbara Steele’s defiant witch, spewing a final curse upon her mortal judges, pierces to the bone.

While Italian movies robbed Steele of her voice, they liberated her from what it had meant in Britain. Leading ladies in Brit films tended to be well brought-up young things, unless they were lusty and working-class like Diana Dors. Even at Hammer, where sexuality was unleashed regularly via bouts of vampirism, the erotically active roles usually went to continental lovelies (Polish immigrant Ingrid Pitt got her work permit based on Hammer’s claim that no native-born actress could exude such desire and desirability). Steele turns up all-too briefly in Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959) as an art school girl, the only kind of role that might allow for both intelligence and a certain liberated attitude. And Steele really was exactly that type. Her appearance is so arresting, you want the movie to simply abandon its plot and follow her into some fresh storyline: it wouldn’t really matter what.

In Italy, Steele suddenly became class-less and nation-less, devoid of associations beyond those conjured by the chiseled cheekbones and enormous eyes (convincingly replaced with poached eggs by Bava for a special effects shot). Her inescapable exoticism didn’t make sense in her native land, but that bone structure could suggest Latin, Slavic, or anything else. Omninational, omnisexual, but definitely carnivorous.

Generally remote with his actors, who were nothing more than compositional elements to him, Bava’s capricious move of selecting his female lead from a magazine photo-spread looks almost prescient in hindsight. Was it luck? Or, perhaps her now legendary eyes suggested a bizarre and beautiful leitmotif… to be destroyed, resurrected, and played endlessly on a register of emotions—extreme emotions, that is, tabooed delights.

Steele shares an anecdote about her director’s temperament and working methods on Black Sunday… “Everything was so meticulously planned that Bava rarely asked me for multiple takes. There was no sense of urgency or drama, which was rare for an Italian director…” I’m suddenly detecting deep ambivalence as she vacillates between little jabs at Bava (“He was a Jesuit priest on the set, somewhere far away”) and gratitude. “There was a tremendous feeling of respect, whereas in my earliest roles at Rank I always felt shoved around, practically negated by the pressure of production.

“Bava did go absolutely berserk once,” she goes on. “John Richardson, this gorgeous, sinewy creature, for some reason couldn’t carry me across the room. And I was like eleven pounds in those days. We had to do it over and over, twenty times or something, and whenever John stumbled or dropped me, the whole crew would be in hysterics. We were all howling with laughter, except for Bava – he went simply wild! Eventually, some poor grip had to get down on all fours, and I rode on his back in a chair with John pretending to carry me.”

If Black Sunday is a summation of spiritual and physical dread, it’s because Steele is everyone in this dream-bauble, everyone and everywhere, an all-consuming autumnal atmosphere. Which, of course, provides Mario Bava with something truly rare—a face and mien as unsettling as horror films always claim to be and almost never are. The devastation she leaves behind, her anarchic displacement, which has nothing to do with conventional notions of performance or “good acting,” is hard to describe. And here Bava earns his label of genius through compositional meaning—amid the groundswells of fog, lifeless trees and gloomy dungeons, Steele is an absence impossibly concretized in penumbras and voids. She is a force of nature never to be repeated.

Nightmare Castle (1965) starts off in Lady Chatterley mode as Steele cheats on her mad scientist husband (“At this rate you’ll wipe out every frog in the entire county,” is an opening line less pithy but more arresting than “Rosebud”) with the horny handyman. She’s soon murdered on an electrified bed, hubby preserving her heart for unexplained reasons while using her blood to rejuvenate his mistress. Then he marries her insipid blonde half sister (Steele again in a blonde wig) and tries to drive her mad. So we now have Gaslight merged with Poe and every revenge-from-the-grave story ever.

The identical twin half-sisters (?) bifurcate further: blonde Barbara goes schizoid, possessed it seems by her departed semi-sibling. Dark Barbara comes back as a very corporeal revenant, hair occluding one profile, like Phil Oakey of the Human League. Tossing the locks aside, she reveals… the horror!

Almost indescribable in terms of plot, character or dialogue, the film looks stunning, as chiaroscuro as Steele’s coal-black hair and snow-white skin. Apparently the product of monkey-typewriter improvisation, the story serves as a kind of post-modern dream-jumble of every Gothic narrative ever. You might get a story like this if you showed all of Steele’s horrors to a pissed-up grade-schooler and then asked them to describe the film they just saw. As a result, the movie really takes what Dario Argento likes to call the “non-Cartesian” qualities of Italian horror to the next dank, stone-buttressed level.

When I first met Barbara Steele about ten years ago, we somehow found ourselves sitting in front of a Brancusi sculpture here in New York City—I remember a filmmaker acquaintance joking afterwards: “Steele beats bronze!” Indeed, at 66 she was still stunningly beautiful, flirtatious, frighteningly aware of the power of her stare.

She was a painter in her youth, so it’s not surprising that, even as I visualize her in a voluptuous, cinematic world of castles and blighted landscapes, her own self-image is perennially absorbed by art—in the sense of André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. She asks me to show her my paintings and when I dodge the subject out of shyness she offers:

A friend of mine just had a show of his art in a little cinema here – very small paintings, about 8 inches by 6 – and then they projected them onto one of their screens and they looked fantastic! Size is everything! Unless you were born in the Renaissance… then you were surrounded by silence and stone walls, shadows and glimmers of gold, and faces that are like spells they look so informed.

Steele speaks of her “old, suspicious Celtic soul,” her bitterness at having “flitted through movies par hazard,” and a newfound desire to make audio books (what colossal revenge!). It’s poetic really, this doppelganger, a ghost-like screen persona following her around. Whenever I think of the effect her movies have had on me, the following words by Charles Lamb leap to mind.

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before. They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to effect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without the body, they would have been the same… That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which may afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

Even the wooliest metaphysics can be hard to separate from actual violence. Case in point: the night of September 22, 1796. Charles Lamb had his own brush with horror, when the future poet and author of children’s stories found himself removing a bloody knife from his sister’s hand. A spasm of matricidal rage that would land her in a mad house—and tending to prove, once again, the need for genres of terror and trepidation. For a moment at least, Steele seems to agree, bowled over by the Lamb anecdote, literally screaming: “AND THAT NAME – LAMB – IT MAKES YOU THINK OF SUCH INNOCENT BRITISH LANDSCAPES!” She’s a fairly solitary and introspective person on the one hand, capable of intense and unexpected eruptions of joy on the other, which may be why Italians have always embraced her—a shared gloomy zest for life, fatalism and pasta. There’s something intensely porous about her (as porous as film itself), which helps clarify her otherwise inscrutable tension with that shadow-self up on the screen, the one she so busily downgrades.

***

The thirties bustled with wise-cracking, fast-talking dames, probably not for any proto-feminist reason, but simply because the writers had a surplus of sassy talk to dispense onto the screen, and audiences liked looking at legs, so why not combine the two? Amid all the petite peroxide pretties, a few acerbic character actresses were allowed room, perhaps to make the cuties bloom all the more radiantly against them. Whatever the aesthetic logic, we can be grateful for it, since it gave us Ruth Donnelly and Winnie Lightner and Jean Dixon and a few other unforgettable shrews and wiseacres, adept as stage mothers, streetwise best pals of the leading lady, etc.

Aline MacMahon sort of fits into this category, but also destroys any category she sees with her laser vision. In Gold Diggers of 1933, she’s a Fanny Bryce type comedy showgirl, and in Heat Lightning (1934) she’s an ex-moll running a garage. In between, she played world-weary secretaries and put-upon mothers, taking any role and stealing the movie along with it. Rather than resist classification, she goes on the offensive, smashing down stereotypes and insisting on her own peculiar individuality.

Big and rangy in the body and hands, she had a strange, sculpted beauty, and was as luminous as Dietrich. Maybe more so: cameramen hit Marlene with brighter lights to make her shine out, whereas Aline was typically in the lead’s shadow. Her complexion is like the glass of milk in Suspicion in which Hitchcock planted a light bulb. That white. A sheet of paper passing before her face would appear as a dark eclipsing rectangle.

The law of photogenics insists that actresses hired to play the non-glamorous roles must be staggeringly lovely, but off-kilter and unconventional enough to fool the audience into thinking they’re seeing failed beauty. Aline’s unlikely photofit of attractive features resulted in a caricature of elegance and earthiness in precisely the wrong proportions, which makes her fascinating and alluring to watch.

The eyes are seriously big, saucers hooded by the heaviest lids since Karloff’s monster, resulting in long slits which strive to echo the even wider mouth, a perfectly straight line seemingly intent on decapitation. Like a horizon with lips. The chin cleft below catches the viewer by surprise. Were chin clefts on women more common then, or did studios screen in favor of them? The cheekbones have a graceful, yet powerful curve, so the face as a whole combines the qualities of an ice-cream baby and a crystal skull. All wrong, and alright with me.

Aline’s humor about her ill-assorted collection of perfect features was often played on in dialogue, so it’s pleasing when a role like the one in Heat Lightning admits that, for all her unlikeliness, she was indeed beautiful. More than a pretty face, too: her way with a snappy rejoinder distinguished her even in an era of exceptional wit and quicksilver delivery. And her essence, which radiated out whatever the role, was that of a philosophical, warm, smart, funny, sad woman: the essence of the age.

By Daniel Riccuito and David Cairns

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scrawnydutchman · 7 years ago

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The Point Sonic Mania Proves About Relevance

Sonic Mania, The beautifully animated, retro, nostalgic callback to the genesis days of Sonic the Hedgehog has made quite an impact in todays market in a way that the Sonic the Hedgehog brand hasn’t made in a long time. It’s the highest rated Sonic game released in years and to this day receives plentiful praise from fans and critics alike. Much to my dismay, I have yet to play the game hands on in order to completely sing it’s praises, but truthfully I’ve been having boundless fun just watching playthroughs of the game online. It helps when you have both pixel sprite and traditional animation that’s some of the best the two mediums have seen in some time respectively. The game captures the 16 bit aesthetic and feel of the genesis installments of Sonic but includes more frames making for more seamless transitions between movements. And the intro . . .OH MY GOODNESS the intro to this game. The classical animation done by Tyson Hesse and Yotta warms my heart and fills me with joy every time I watch it. It’s just fantastic. The pop in colour, the expressiveness in the characters eyes, the smears, the angles, the smoke effects. It’s simply masterful.

Now, the visuals of this game are the real reason I’m talking about it in this blog post, because I think the very existence of Sonic Mania and it’s positive reception makes a very important point about what it really means to be relevant. Many people, including the staff behind the Sonic franchise in the past, believe that relevance means keeping up with the times. It means knowing what people are into today and capitalizing on societies current sensibilities. Marketing always tries it’s hardest to adapt as quickly and frequently as we change. But often times it misses the point about why we as an audience cling to the things we cling to in the first place. Fads may get you a quick buck in the moment, but that revenue will die quickly if what you’re selling had no identity outside of being “what the kids are into nowadays”. For a brand to be profitable in the long run and be something so lovable and influential it remains within our culture and continues to shape it, it has to have timeless qualities. More specifically, it has to have qualities nobody will find quite the same anywhere else. I can’t think of a single property more telling of this point then Sonic the Hedgehog.

Sonic the Hedgehog was invented by Sonic Team and Sega as a means to be as competitive a brand as possible. His sole purpose from the get go was to rival Nintendo’s Italian plumber in popularity, and thus provide the Genesis with the means to compete with the NES because being twice the bits wasn’t enough to push itself forward. When it comes to creating a compelling rival for Mario, goddamn . . .did Sega ever knock it out of the park. I’ve heard people say in the past that Sonic the Hedgehog’s design and conception is genius and I wholeheartedly agree. There should be an entire class around studying the design and conception of Sonic because he was practically destined to become a huge success. His design is the perfect combination of curves + points = cool. I’ve talked in the past about how linework can play an influential role in the impression a character design makes on an audience, and how curves are often associated with cuteness, innocence, youth and a sense of safety, whereas points are associated with danger, sinister motives and villainy. Sonic is one of those designs that emplores both; he’s got a stubby, plump little design with a large head and larger expressive eyes, but his quills give him an edge of adventure and his pointy smirk gives him a sense of mischief. Not to mention he’s a compilation of old sensibilities from retro cartoons. Large shoes, dotted eyes, white gloves, and instead of straight up eyebrows he has this one eyeball two pupil thing that had a narrow gap in the middle that almost makes him look like he’s frowning, very similar to what Felix the Cat has (sounds weird when you say it out loud, but tbf it looks much more natural on classic sonic then the more modern spin). Add these familiar sensibilities with a pop in colour and a great animal theme, plus a game mechanic not featured in any other franchise at the time, and you’ve got a franchise that will fly right off the shelves. Sega set out with a goal to make a memorable mascot and they grasped onto something truly timeless.

It’s too bad they didn’t recognize how perfect their inception was and decided then to try and fix what wasn’t broken. Enter late 90s/early 2000s. Sega is falling out of the console race in a hard time when Sony and Microsoft are beginning to enter the scene and make their stay. They’re clinging on for dear life and know they have to create something that will maintain their relevance. So they premiere with the Dreamcast, a console fondly remembered with a cult following but at it’s time was hilariously outsold by the PS2. More important then that though, they premiered Sonic Adventure . . .and with it, the new Sonic.

So remember that perfect balance of cute and dangerous classic Sonic had to capture that timeless sense of cool? Sega decided to disrupt that balance by making Sonic’s design and overall outlook shift further into the dangerous edgy aspect. He got taller, leaner, looked angrier, hands and feet larger, green in his eyes. He went from speechless to extreme 90s skater dude. And ever since this change he’s been delving further and further into gimmicks, edgy storylines and pretty much drifting as far away from that timeless charm he used to have as possible. Now I don’t mean to bash anybody who likes this version of Sonic; if you’re a fan, more power to you. But this version is more a guilty pleasure for me then anything else. I think of him less as a high quality piece of popular culture and more just a hilarious over the top dated product of his time. This Sonic is like the kid in high school who grew up as the nerd all his life and is trying desperately hard to reinvent himself and live down his past of mockery, hiding behind trends, current lingo and a pseudo personality to try and maintain some credibility. It’s more desperate then anything else. The only difference is, Sonic was never a nerd. He didn’t have anything to prove or to live down; he was ALWAYS loved because he was simple and fun and never needed to be anything beyond that. Plus it’s worth noting that down the line he got more realistic textures like shine in his shoes and eyeballs which, for a design as cartoony as this, it’s not charming; it’s just creepy. That single eyeball thing is significantly more eerie now that he’s demanding to be taken more seriously.

The Sonic Adventure titles may not be inherently bad games and are quite impressive for their time, I understand that. But they DID introduce some newer issues that would stick to sonic for nearly 2 decades after the fact. Issues that would eventually become so problematic that Sonic would lose further and further credibility with the fanbase it established. Sonic 06, Sonic Riders, Shadow the Hedgehog, bits of Sonic Unleashed, the storybook saga, aspects of Colors, Sonic Boom, Sonic Lost World. While not all of these games are completely awful they do hinge on gimmicks and some sort of experimentation that misses the point on why Sonic was so popular to begin with and, again, it tries to fix what wasn’t broken. Some of the changes they make work, most commonly the changes made to alter the physics based gameplay to not only move faster but to have tighter controls and a greater sense of freedom. It also doesn’t help that design wise Sega would further disrupt what was once a delicate balance in Sonic’s design, making for an awkward unappealing abomination.

*shudders*. Everything I hate about the Dreamcast Sonic design is a million times worse in Sonic Boom.

But, bringing it back to Sonic Mania (like what this title suggests), it seems like Sega is starting to wake back up. Sonic Mania just seems to get everything that’s great about Sonic with nothing superfluous. Bright colours, fluid motion, tight controls, great physics based gameplay. THAT’S IT. No gimmicks. No lingo or speech that will become dated in 5 years. No stepping away from what made your brand the icon that it is today. Notice that I never said 3D was inherently a step backward like many people profess. I’m convinced you can accomplish this in 3D and to an extent Sega has. They just gotta trim the fat.

Now I can already see a few typical criticisms coming. People are going to think I’m a 30 year old Sonic fan blinded by nostalgia governing my opinion rather than an objective look on the series as a whole. They also think I hate experimentation and that I just shun the idea of anything ever changing. Here is my rebuttal.

I am not 30 years old. I am actually 21, and my first introduction to the Sonic franchise was the Dreamcast version. For a while that was my favorite version, up until my brother got me the sega genesis collection on Gamecube disc format. I didn’t understand at the time why sonic was so fat and I was confused as to why none of the games on the disc were the classic sonic adventure titles, because I was a dumb uncultured piece of shit. But I played the games anyway and came out of my shallow sensibilities. And you know what? Those titles gave me more enjoyment then the sonic adventure games ever did. I mainly credit this to just how much more immediately accessible they were. No awkward cutscenes, no loading screens, no walking around aimlessly trying to figure out where to go, no boring alternate character missions. Just press start and go. Like I said, trim the fat.

As for the idea that I hate experimentation . . . no, I don’t. If anything, the biggest reason I love classic Sonic so much is because it brought something for it’s time that was completely new and not recaptured by anything else, and seamlessly altered our sensibilities for years to come. Experimentation is great because it moves culture forward; makes us as people more adept and refined in the kind of things we enjoy and gives us a greater understanding as to why we enjoy them. Without all the experimentation we’ve been given in gaming our opinions on the medium would have never evolved to the culture it’s developed today. But experimentation has to be properly motivated. It can’t be misguided. It should only replace what was established if what was established sucked to begin with, otherwise it should be BUILDING on that foundation. I’ve gone on record in saying that modern day is far too filled with remakes and reboots of old properties and I stay true to that, but I ALSO said that if you’re going to bring back a property it should be for the sake of exploring potential not fully realized the first time around, like with the Samurai Jack series. It shouldn’t be for the sole purpose of just retracing the same steps again. Sonic Mania may be nostalgia based, but what really sells it for many people including myself is the little but NECESSARY changes it makes. The appealing animation is even smoother, the controls are tighter (from what I heard), the nostalgic stages have neat little changes and mechanics they didn’t have in years prior. Sonic Mania does what Sonic has been missing for so long. It builds on it’s great foundation rather then tries to reinvent it entirely. If we wanted a game vastly different from Sonic, WE WOULD BE PLAYING SOMETHING OTHER THEN SONIC.

Conclusion:

Sonic Mania is a solid reminder and a great lesson on what It means to be truly relevant. It’s not about keeping tabs on current trends, it’s not about straying away from your old self as much as possible. It’s about knowing what you bring to the table regardless of what era we’re in and owning it, and if you DO make changes, make changes that further reinforce and greater purpose the thing you’ve got that people can’t get anywhere else. Sonic remains popular even to this day when it’s copycats like Bubsy have fallen hard from grace (that they may or may not have even had in the first place), and it’s because Sonic’s more then just a few one liners, fourth wall breaks and a “dude with attitude”. He’s an ideal on how games can be played, on how platformers can work and how familiar sensibilities can be made better.

#sonic the hedgehog #sonic mania #video games #gaming #sega genesis #sega #nintendo #nintendo switch #nostalgia #sonic adventure #animation #2d animation #game review

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life-back-home · 7 years ago

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2018 Reading List

o A book recommended by a librarian: A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

o A book that’s been on your TBR: Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman)

o A book of letters: I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (Tucker Max)

o A book by a POC: A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini)

o A book with one of the seasons in the title: When Autumn Leaves (Amy S. Foster)

o A book that is a story within a story: Fangirl (Rainbow Rowell)

o A book with multiple authors: Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn (Roger Aspirin)

o An espionage thriller: The Love Interest (Cale Dietrich)

o A book with a cat on the cover: Pet Sematary (Stephen King)

o A book by an author under a pseudonym: The Regulators (Richard Bachman)

o A bestseller from a genre you don’t normally read: And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)

o A book about a person with a disability: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (David Wroblowski)

o A book with subtitle: The Bartimaeus Trilogy: Book One… (Jonathan Stroud)

o A book published in 2018: The Prince and the Dressmaker (Jen Wang)

o A book with a mythical creature: The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle)

o A book you’ve read before that makes you smile: The Tale of Despereaux (Kate DiCamillo)

o A book about food: Monster’s Chef (Jervey Tervalon)

o A book with career advice: A Theory of Nothing (Thomas Barlow)

o A book from a nonhuman perspective: The Plague Dogs (Richard Adams)

o A steampunk novel: The Alchemy of Stone (Ekaterina Sedia)

o A book with a red spine: Paper Towns (John Green)

o A book set in the wilderness: Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)

o A book you loved as a child: The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster)

o A book by an author from another country: Pigeon English (Stephen Kelman)

o A book with a title that is a character’s name: Demian (Herman Hesse)

o A novel set during wartime: A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)

o A book with an unreliable narrator: Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk)

o A book with pictures: A Little Princess (Frances Hodgson Burnett)

o A book where the main character is different ethnicity: Push (Sapphire)

o A book about an interesting woman: The Obituary Writer (Ann Hood)

o A book set in two different time periods: The Time-Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)

o A book with a month/day of the week in the title: The Wednesday Wars (Gary D. Schmidt)

o A book set in a hotel: Hotels of North America (Rick Moody)

o A book written by someone you admire: Eleanor & Park (Rainbow Rowell)

o A book becoming a movie in 2018: A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle)

o A book set during holiday other than Christmas: The Halloween Tree (Ray Bradbury)

o The first in a series you haven’t read: The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman)

o A book you bought on a trip: The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (Carolyn Mackler)

o A book recommended by an author you love: Lolita (Vladimir Nabakov)

o A bestseller from 2016: Truly Madly Guilty (Liane Moriarty)

o A book with a familial term in the title: Aunt Julia and the Script-Writer (Mario Vargas Llosa)

o A book that takes place over a character’s life span: Big Fish (Daniel Wallace)

o A book about an immigrant/refugee: Orphan Train (Christina Baker Kline)

o A book from a genre you’ve never heard of: The Boundless Deep (Kate Brailler)

o A book with an eccentric character: The Devil Wears Prada (Lauren Weisberger)

o A book that’s over 800 pages: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (Susanna Clarke)

o A book you got from a used book sale: Asta in the Wings (Jan Elizabeth Watson)

o A book that’s been mentioned in another book: The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

o A book about a difficult topic: The Effects of Light (Miranda Beverly-Whittemore)

o A book based on mythology: The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)

#library

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gta5onlinemoneyhack-blog1 · 8 years ago

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The game's soundtrack however is my pet peeve. There's a lot of radio stations but not enough variety - there's one for rock, one for country/western about about 9 for hip-hop, rap and pop music. The single talk show is also very repetitive which is shoddy in comparison to GTA4 and back's, and if you don't like the game's music, you'll be listening to the Fernando Show constantly or nothing at all. Woohoo. Thank goodness Vice City was based in '86 - I'll buy the soundtrack CD and play that on my Xbox's media player, thanks.

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From beginning to end, this game totally lived up to everything I hoped it would be. It took me almost exactly 61 hours to beat GTA 4, and that was with a little 'time wasting' in between, and a few mini-quests. Even though the story is over for me, it's one of those discs that gets a lot of spin-time in my PS3.

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Hey, before I say anything it is good to hear that your son has taken up karate. I am 13 and I got an Xbox 360 when I was about 11 when I got it I had a couple games like Call of Duty and Guitar Hero. Let me note when I first got it I was over weight. I played Xbox a good 4-5 hours a day. After a while I started wanting to become a marine because I wanted to do good and take down evil leaders. Also, playing Guitar Hero made me want to learn to play the guitar. I am no longer over-weight and I am in guitar lessons. So if it was not for Xbox I would not know what I wanted to do with my life.

My mum and I have this mutual understanding, I bring in the grades, withstand at least a 3.2 gpa, and I get to play all I want. It's a reward at a sense, as a student I'd like to spend my free time however I please. Who's to say I can't do something simple as kick back and play? It could be so much worse, think about it.

I know I am only 16 and don't really have any advice for you but I have always had a time limit on the Xbox where I can play for an hour, and then have to have at least an hour off of it. My other two rules are that I am not allowed to play on school nights, and am not allowed to play past 6 'clock at night.

microsoft sent us a new unit about a year ago because we were havin so many issues with it- called today to see if it was still under warranty and they said they don't renew your warranty when you send it in...... so they can go suck it b/c we are in the middle of takin it apart as we speak and hopefully it will actually start reading disks again- Thank you!!!

We've had a lot of fun here today. I hope you've learned something worthwhile about GTA 4 and everything it has to offer, both intentionally and unintentionally. Hopefully you've been able to find the swingset of doom, and some of the easter eggs I mentioned above.

Virtual friendships are real. Digital photoraphy is real. Lots of people get married meeting online first. Music is nowadays created with computers and shared virtually before it even comes out on a CD. Creating characters, cars, levels, liveries, game photos and videos, mini-games, etc. very much is a form of artistic expression. Games are an artform just like film, books, and other forms of expression. There are games that tell stories, games with accurate historical contexts, games for making music, games about managing companies, nations, games about crafting tools, games about creating mechanical objects, games about tuning cars, creating and managing sports teams, even games about creating games where you can share them with the world!

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My son will be a teenager in the summer, so I'm sure I have lots of other issues to look forward to! I liked the bit you wrote about your kids not having their own computers and not having the password to yours. It made me laugh because I was just the same - my son had to ask to go on my laptop and I would type in the password for him. I didn't used to have a password but got fed up with it being carted off and used whenever he fancied without asking. Anyway, with the password in place he asked to use it and I let him - next time I logged on I discovered he had used the time to set up his own account and protect it with his own password! It was very cheeky I know, but did show initiative! I made him take off the password. He is far more technical than me though, I have to ask for his help a lot because I am the opposite. His Dad works in IT, I think he takes after him.

Hi rorshak sobchak - you are right about how addictive some games seem to be, and they certainly seem to act as substitutes for other areas in life for some young people. My son thinks my childhood sounds awful and can't imagine what I used to do - I told him that when I was his age nobody had anything like an Xbox at home and so we were busy doing other things. Although, we did sometimes play games like Space Invaders and PacMan and Mario, but they were only available in arcades. However, even then I did find them a bit addictive - the only reason it was not a problem was that the opportunity to play was not so readily available and of course you had to put money in! And you couldn't have lots of goes in a row as other children were waiting for their turn. Actually, I would love it to still be like that, a lot more sociable and the games were much more innocent.

Also: survey scam. They also have a standalone download on offer (supposedly) but that's also hidden away behind a separate survey prompt. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that you're not going to be the richest gamer alive in GTA land should you bother to fill one of them in.

From the days of joysticks to today's motion-sensitive gaming apparatus, video games are constantly getting more technologically advanced. If you want to stay on top of the latest gadgets, you need to know what you're doing. Read on to find some advice on a variety of video gaming topics.

That isn't to say that there aren't people that have gone the Windows 8 route. With the wide range of PC's sold, and all of the recent Windows computers going to 8, Microsoft isn't going to go down without a fight. The problem at this time seems to be that developers don't want to work with the quirky ARM processor that the Surface uses.

i found a fun ting to do. you know those trollies with cardboard boxes in them (usually near hobos) if you push one with a car towards a hill and walk on it before it goes down, you have an unstoppalbe transportation device, especially when cops ram you at high speen sending you zooming off mowing down ppl in a furious rage!

Who knows what the beating heart is a reference to, if anything at all. Maybe it's just there because it can be. Or maybe there's some kind of joke among the developers that lead to its inclusion into the game. Either way, it's beating, and invulnerable.

The original Infamous was highly acclaimed by reviewers and is often considered on of the best PS3 games available. The series was praised for its simple core mechanics, varied missions, and strong story. Infamous 2 received similar praise and holds a score of 83 on Metacritic.

Your dingy cell phone becomes one of your most used gadgets from the very beginning of the game, and it enables you to keep in touch with friends you meet along the way. Set up a date, check on your cousin, or see what's new with the street boss you just met...or, listen to their answering machine machine if they don't pick up.

Go for a balance between speed and strength. Remaining versatile keeps your opponent guessing, whereas using just one tactic will allow your opponents to read your play. If you have both strength and speed in your arsenal, your opponent won't know what you'll use. This unknown factor will benefit you massively.

Also, I would have thought I'd have more problems with mobile platforms, like smart phones and handhelds, but for whatever reason my kids will just as often use them for reading books or watching video, and for less often than when in front of a TV. Not sure why. Finally, I'd like to add that there are a lot of games out that I've enjoyed, like Child of Light, that I would never have even heard of if my kids weren't into games.

I think it's very mature of you to welcome all sorts of opinion on this hub. It was also interesting to see your view evolve from the first post to the last and accept games a little bit more as an art form and a creative outlet, which they very much are.

Step 4. Remove top and bottom gray mesh panels by prying them off with any small objects by inserting them into holes on the sides of the xbox console at the left, middle, and right points where you can see the grey tabs and pushing in to release the catches.

The Games Console have really improved the performance experience for the gamers. Having said that, they must either accept the things that are readily available or wait with baited breath for the invention and release of innovative additions and improvements. People are always in search for more desirable alternatives to increase their comfort and pleasure levels. These digital gaming tools are specially produced to enthrall the gamers with their unique & interactive attributes. These radiant technologies have sufficient options for both kids along with the more matured, as well as, let them to utilize their leisure time.

Unlike other GTA-inspired games though the focus is on hand-to-hand combat and relies on a cover system when the player chooses to use a weapon (although I found it more enjoyable to always go for hand-to-hand as the control scheme really shines when you use it). As the game is of the free-roam genre players can progress at their own pace through the storyline.

The bank robbery mission in GTA 4 is one of the most exciting, bringing up memories of great Heist movies like Heat. As with most interiors in GTA 4, the area becomes inaccesible after you finish the mission, preventing you from ever entering the location again.

Give Parachute: If you find yourself needing this cheat then you've probably left things a little bit late, but if you can enter it quickly enough it can still save your behind. Take our advice and pick one of these up before heading out to go BASE-jumping - it'll all end in tears otherwise (not to mention blood, and assorted flappy bits).

Hold the LB button to put in a deep cross. Especially if your player is making a run into the box. Watch your players. If they point into the box, put it there. This is the most dangerous type of cross as your player is moving at a fast pace, creating a much more powerful header!

You obviously know nothing about creativity and immersion. Hobbes such as sports promote violence and (surprise) have a much higher rate of injury and even mortality then gaming. The thing that parents like this obviously fail to see is the fact that because they grew up one way does not mean there child will be the same. It's a new generation and there are many positive games out there that promote creativity and letting yourself sink into the game as if you are in that universe and that is a great thing. So just because he plays the main stream shooters dosent mean he won't branch out to other better games. He might make a career of making them one day. Give him some freedom to explore his interests.

But I think what it really boils down too (and I in no way claim to be expert on kids or parenting or anything) is that your son is still a kid, very easily stimulated, doesn't really know what he's truly capable of yet and has yet to learn to tell his friends to go jump in a river when confronted with peer pressure.

In Machinarium you solve various brain teasers and puzzles that are linked together through an overworld. Machinarium is a unique adventure story that contains no dialogue (spoken or written), and apart from a few early tutorial prompts, the game does not use any form of understandable language, instead relying on animated thought bubbles.

I originally put this list together for a family friend and decided to share it here so other fans of the Club Penguin universe can find similar experiences that are both fun, friendly and safe. If you have any additional favourite games please don't hesitate to share them in the comment section at the end of the page.

I read your hub. It was great! I myself are a xbox 360 owner and one on the 'rare' girls. I do agree that the xbox can take over ,bit by bit, hobbies. It does get really frustrating! I do have kid friendly games like fifa 13 but I have played all the james bond games and the mass effects series. Don't get me wrong my parents feel extremely strongly about violence so I don't own horrific games like Call of Duty or Battlefield. I do agree that the james bond games are like most other games and the age rating should be reviewed. Thanks so much for posting and happy future endeavours.

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